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“If we valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” – JRR Tolkien

“Look at Nature! All Nature loafs, while Man alone works for a living.” – Morton Tolboll

When we really tune into our experience of this world right now, and think back one, three, or even 10 years ago, would you say you are more content and satisfied, or less? Does everything make more sense to you, or less? Most importantly, do you have more time to spend enjoying the things that Life offers, or less? Even though everything is abstractly in the “now”, having enough time is, ironically, our most precious resource.

As you reflect on your own answers, I hope it turns out that you are more content, feel like more things are clearer to you, and that you are enjoying a load of time to be with your family, friends, and favorite pursuits. Congratulations, for you are part of a rare and possibly shrinking percentile of the population. If you are not experiencing this expanded state of life, then perhaps you’ll resonate with my call for the Slow Life.

My own perceptions about why it is that there is so much pressure, stress and anxiousness is as multidimensional as the causes themselves. Just some of the current causes are as follows:

Existential anxiety due to too much bad news in media, social media bullying, social media software design, disruptions politically, economically and socially.

Many people in our developed information-based societies are dancing as fast as possible to maintain their standard of living. A good deal more are staying just ahead of losing their livelihood, their income, or their home. Debt and debt service are at record highs. A good many sacrifice warmth and comfort just to be able to put food on the table for themselves and their families. The world is too busy trying to stave off collapse to notice that it’s eating up a massive amount of their attention, resources, and most importantly, time.

Since you’re reading this, I can safely assume that you are deeply interested in spirituality, meditation, transformation, positive perspectives and creating a better world for yourself and everyone else too. Choosing peace, and living a peaceful life is also one of your priorities. However, the world is far from being a peaceful place…currently anyway. Struggle, anxiety, depression and adrenal fatigue are a very real experience for many. Desperation and starvation are something that too many children and their parents are enduring in places like Syria and Yemen. We’d all like to do something more, to contribute more, to help more, but we ourselves are often also just too busy with our dreams, our careers, and the needs of others close to us to be able to do much more than we are already doing.​If everything in your life is fantastic, free, easy and full of joy, then I congratulate you heartily! But if you’re feeling doubt or fear what the future may hold or are even just too tired to care much at all, then I’d like to invite you to really take a long look at your world, your experience and begin to question the stories of how the world works. It is vitally important to understand where we are first, before creating any possible solutions.In order to do this, you’re going to have to create a slower life. You can’t see or hear anything properly if it’s whizzing by too quickly! Start by carving out 10-15 minutes a day…to do nothing that relates to your work or list of responsibilities. I don’t even want to suggest to you that you meditate, but you could “do” that!

Get into a quieter space. Bedroom? Close the door, turn off the phone. You could pick something that you enjoy doing…thoroughly, like sewing, or cooking, or reading. Better yet, just sit. Eyes open or eyes closed. Sit…quietly. Listen to your breath, your heart. Watch your mind churn…and keep following your own breath. Focus on a single object in front of you if that helps…and really gaze at it effortlessly.

Just…let…go.​If you find you’re getting annoyed with nothing to do, or with abject silence, then welcome to the club. You’re on the verge of detecting where we are constantly up against a program of distraction from what really matters, which is connection to Source, your own soul and body well-being. Source, God, Goddess, Love, or whatever name you choose to call it, is the Infinite Divine wellspring of everything there is, and everything that isn’t. You didn’t create yourself, and you are alive and breathing through the agency of this Source, and you cannot alter that fact. Pretty humbling stuff, if you ask me. Consciousness and awakening are the ultimate impulse of the Life-Love energy that pulses throughout all that is. Can you just rest in that presence for even 10 minutes? Give it a try. Oh, and you don’t need any intermediary for this…no angels, no masters, no guides. Just you and You. No problem!

After this little experiment, write down what you experienced and what you didn’t experience. It’s a merely a reflective exercise, without a right or wrong to it. Ideally, it can bring you into a place of real pleasurable sensations…a sense of calmness and okay-ness. At least that’s the idea and ideal.

Since we are in the season of giving, I’d suggest that one of the big things you can begin to express with whatever you come away with from these slow life moments is compassion. To give kindness and compassion to whomever you encounter over the last few weeks of 2018 will have great effect. It’s an equalizer, and the one something that we all are needing more of is love and a sense of belonging…the power of communing and community. The best currency, and in my opinion only currency is Love. If you give a donation, let it be wrapped in the felt presence of deliberate and premeditated love. Slow down, and ask the homeless person if they are okay, or if you make the time, ask them to share a bit about themselves. You may get quite an illuminating education and blessing in the process. The money part isn’t the main gift. It’s the gift of time you give to another…a space that is priceless when so many just rush on by, averting their eyes, and caught up in their personal troubles and drama.

Back in a few days with the next segment on The Slow Life. The astrology of Chiron now direct in Pisces is priming us for major healing opportunities on many levels, so relax into the possibilities of what that might engender for yourself.​Blessings on your journey,Isaac

​“Live for yourself, and you will live in vain. Live for others, and you will live again.” – Bob Marley

If you are reading this, perhaps you’ve always had a deep and unresolved yearning to know the “truth” about everything. Or, maybe you’ve just had some hard knocks in your life recently, and nothing is making much sense to you now. No matter how you slice it, the reality is that there are very few people who are self-actualized on this planet, who are successful according to society’s definitions, and don’t seem to have a care in the world.

According to a report issued last spring by the World Health Organization (WHO) depression is now a major pandemic affecting millions worldwide, and it’s increasing with each passing month. Even the famous and successful actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has recently admitted that he was so depressed as a teenager after his mother attempted suicide that he was crying all the time, and he now urges men to open to their real feelings. [Links below]

It’s not farfetched to think that we’re not really standing on solid ground any longer. The old beliefs, institutions, and explanations around our reasons for being alive and on this planet don’t cut it anymore, and as a species we are more stressed out, disconnected and yearning for meaning than ever before. Does it feel like you have no time or space to just BE, much less enjoy your life without having a moment’s respite from demands that our societies place on us? If so, then please read on.

About six weeks into the year 1994 I had some extraordinary events conspire to create an equally extraordinary experience that literally and figuratively changed my life. The esoteric version is that what seemingly happened to me was a classic case of a phenomena known in certain shamanic traditions as “being touched by the gods.” In the Hindu tradition it’s known as a kundalini awakening. According to Stanislav Grof, M.D (who developed the Holotropic Breathwork technique), it falls into a classification he refers to as “spiritual emergency, or emergence”. No matter what label one assigns to a massive and sudden shift in perspective (and one’s previous life circumstances) the actual experience is completely unhinging and full of unknowns. Within two months my wife at that time insisted that I go in for some sort of mental health help. This felt a bit embarrassing to me at first, but my newfound inner voice said to go with it.

During the next three months as this paranormal shift deepened, I launched into an investigation of my psyche and emotions. I saw my primary psychologist once, or sometimes twice a week. She also recommended I join a men’s group at the facility. The facilitator of this group had a pet saying to encourage us when we felt overwhelmed or became less than satisfied with our ‘progress’.

“The journey is the accomplishment”, he would intone, and suddenly the pressure would lift, and be replaced with a spaciousness that was remarkable. Within that spaciousness we became observers of our constantly shifting set of feelings, thoughts and perspectives. Of course, an hour or two later, back in the real world, some of this lucidness would succumb to the demands of life, but the effects became accumulative. By mid-June my primary therapist had decided to discharge me, as she felt that I’d become competent enough to steer my way forward without tripping up. All during this process, my inner voice would counsel me as well, indicating what was available to share in therapy, while carefully avoiding any of the more profound paranormal or spiritual experiences that may have triggered an intervention by the medical establishment that would be chemical-based. In the end, I felt much better equipped to cope and to move forward, and so I am grateful that I did engage with the psychological services at a time that I now refer to as my 3rd major awakening (and the most profound) of this lifetime.

Over the course of the past few days that spanned the total Solar Eclipse on September 1st I’ve became more acutely aware of the most precious gifts and skills that I have to share and how I can give them to others in a balanced and empowering way. Hopefully playfully as well. As of this writing my awareness is still unfolding organically about what it means, but for someone that has had so many careers, interests and skills over one lifetime, it’s sometimes very challenging to see the core of what it is at any given moment. Perhaps the most important thing or quality that are unique to one’s own soul is always enticing us to keep going, to push on through to the essential meaning of ourselves. Using this knowing in order to express it in some effective way which can not only impact others positively, but transform one’s own direct experience at the same time, is now the task in front of my nose. The most important thing I feel to share with you here is that we scarcely have much of a chance in these times to take stock of where we are in retrospect with where we’ve arrived from.

We all have a story, a legacy of experience that stretches into the distant past. Our perception of time is the key to how we arrange this story. In fact, there is a distinct possibility that we are all involved in the creation and management of time. For an interesting read about this notion, click on this: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/04/27/time-felt-marc-wittmann/

Our stories are based on experiences in various times and dimensions, and perhaps for some of us, across countless worlds or dimensions. However, to keep it manageable, let’s just engage with our humanness, our earthly sagas. What was revealed to me post-Eclipse this past Thursday was not a concept, idea or philosophy. It was a visceral and immediate knowing about the sanctity and enormity about the struggles, growth and accomplishments I've been through over the past two years or so. Once the full impact of this was unveiled, I saw my whole life from my earliest years stretched behind me, and in a sort of fast-moving vignette I felt the power of my various successes and failures, joys and sorrows, ecstasies as well as times of depression and doubt, and all mingled into this was every person I’ve known and each relationship I’ve been part of. I was humbled...big time.

Waves of compassion for who I am beyond all of this was in harmony with the range of the experiences themselves, and I could begin to understand that these moments, all connected one to another, are the stuff our Souls are made from. We will always carry these memories with us forever, for they have molded and shaped Who We Are. To say there is only the Now is not entirely accurate. The past is still influencing us, and our present is always informing the formation of our futures. In the lyrics of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Future Games’ – “We create the future that we want to face…” So true it is. But without our personal Soul story, our His and Herstory, there is no Big Story within the Cosmos. We may well wonder what is the ultimate purpose of existence considering such a perspective. Perhaps its all just an experiment to explore and experience everything and anything that is possible, in order for us to eventually move to another mode of evolution in which there is even more to create and experience. Possibly. From this brief but powerful series of moments I felt the touch of the Infinite, and how it permeates all of Time, and the deepest most personal spaces inside of each one of us.

Between today as you read this, and the Lunar Eclipse on September 16th we have an opportunity to not just “let go” of what we deem no longer serves us, or which we see as obstacles that may be in the way of where it is we want to go, and who we wish to become. This process has nothing to do with the Moon's cycle, but is related to another one, the Saturn-Neptune square, that last exact moment of which occurs tomorrow. It's lasted almost a year, and has been a real challenge for many.

Perhaps what arises is just the recycled pain, trauma and judgment we have need of reconciling, after which we can then see the greater wisdom of our stories and how we are all heroes and heroines within them - fearless and eternal…full of love, hopes, dreams and immense aspirations. I certainly desire this feeling I touched and which touched me for all beings, for I found within it the true basis for loving myself unconditionally, and all without any sense of shame or self-centeredness. In fact, it only awakened in me a stronger notion of my purpose and how much I desire everyone else to taste the true freedom they so deserve and desire. The freedom to just be…to just be all of themselves, full stop.

And here’s something that must be said at this juncture. Consider the possibility that all of this just…goes…on. Ad infinitum. Forever. No crossing a finish line or standing in the winner’s circle. No ‘retirement’ from being the being that you are being. How do I know this? I don’t, it's just a guess. However, that’s just part of the Mystery, isn’t it? We’ll get to find out…as we go along. And not one moment sooner. So perhaps the sooner we recognize this, the sooner we can see it’s all an experiment and we’re all just playing around. Or, something like that.

Take some time to reflect these next weeks, on the amazing journey you’ve been on. Take some time for self-appreciation and honoring your journey, and also those with whom you have spent time with during it. Take the time to sit with the enormity of what you’ve overcome or achieved, and have the greatest compassion for all those times you loved, and lost, or tried and failed. There is no such thing as real failure, and no true love is ever lost. Each and every one of our triumphs and our defeats, or good deeds and our mistakes, are indelibly part of the work of Soul Art that you are. Can you love all of it, all of you? We are all called to this most sacred of tasks, for in doing so, we love and honor that which created us from Love Itself.

This is the nugget of all things, and it resides in one eternal precept. The journey is the accomplishment.

With Love,Isaac

I am an intuitive spiritual mentor, guide and evolutionary soul-based astrologer. I am a catalyst for change and growth. I compassionately hold space for you to discover and celebrate your Soul-Self, your unique beingness. I specialize in the areas of spiritual emergence/awakening and assisting others to find ways to heal their relationship with themselves and with their partners and to fully embrace their sexuality. I currently reside in the UK and have a worldwide clientele spanning over two decades of service. If you would like more information about how I may assist you, or if you wish to book a free Discovery call with me or have any questions about my services, please click hereto visit my website, or email me at archariel@hotmail.com. UK Ph: ﻿+44 07875 123406﻿. Skype @ ﻿dolphinboy999﻿.